Right, I think you mean “unfavourable to a certain class”. Visible reality shows that it’s perfectly possible, although governments are still adept at suppression.
Contract law depends on enforcement by those with the monopoly on violence, who make the law, punish and judge - that means states. Always did throughout known history, since Sumeria.
That, in turn, enabled the appearance of crypto cities and crypto countries, where, previously, offshore heavens could be found. We are not seeing just the appearance of a new type or flavour of currency or solution to the inflation problem.
Inflation is not a problem. it's a feature.
Money is a tool for trading, not for hoarding. Hoarding is done on actual material goods, or debts. Inflation enforces that use of money as a trade vehicle. It just should not get too high, 'hyperinflation'. Think of what savings are today: you have a savings account, that is a credit on the bank. Or you hold bonds or other debt instruments. For the latest few years it's pretty obvious that hoarding is being made on real estate also. Hoarding is, of course,
bad for people in general.
What we call savings are done in debt instruments with some "liquidity", have been ever since money and specie was disconnected. Back when money happened to be also a precious metal it could be used also for hoarding due to that dual nature, but that caused a problem of lack of incentive to invest. Which was the problem with the gold standard - periodic deflation and crisis were
unavoidable.The cryptocraps are just another debt instrument.
Want proof? They're traded and priced in currency.
Management of state currencies means managing inflation so as to discourage excessive hoarding tendencies and make sure that wealth doesn't get to concentrated and people busy playing games of trading hoarded goods with each other instead of producing actually useful stuff.
Wat evidence that such a thing is bad, and that this
liberalized economy has gone off-tract, governments are failing to inflate away wealth? The "shortages" in the US, creeping in Europe... too many people spending their time speculating uselessly instead of producing something useful! The physicists became "quants", the writing has been on the wall for years...
What we are seeing can be characterised as “digitalisation of value”. Value can be stored in the cloud or in your tattoo and summoned at will in an instant. It can be programmed to perform various tasks, including those, which, throughout history, were the privilege of the wealthiest classes in the society and financial institutions.
Only if you don't know history. Notes started as notes of credit created by any merchant and passed around depending on trust placed by the public on that merchant. Banking went through "wild west" periods, including literally the Wild West of the USA period. The exact same behaviors, constraints and consequences of the wild west of banking period are happening with the cryptocraps. Read Galbraith's classic
Money - Whence it came, where it went for a short historical overview. There is nothing new in this crap, it's a slight variation of something that repeatedly happened before.
Imo the worst thing with cryptocrap compared with banking wild wests is that the cryptocrap is not even being sued by enterprising scammers to get funds to actually produce something. It's purely a shall game play that so engrosses people that they spend their time doing socially useless trades in pursuit of personal wealth. Imagine small island with a cryptofad. Or any other get-rich-trading fad. If everyone engages on it solely,
everyone starves. What I mean to point out is that trading speculatively in pursuit of wealth does not produce anything to be consumed by people. Does not sustain anyone, does not create anything useful for live.
Also, even the promise of a limited emission and allegedly (why should scarcity mean value anyway?) eternally rising price is just that,
a promise. Which gets broken, and eventually ends in crying by those left holding the bag. Remember: contracts depend on enforcement by state power. The algorithm and the trading of any crytocrap depends on
a lot of contract enforcement. The more complex it is, the more it depends on the orderly workings of an infrastructure enforced by states. This is not your old carrying silver or gold on a mule to the next town to pay for something. Then you needed weapons to defend from bandits killing you and taking it. Now you need communications networks correctly working, protection from all the people exploiting software vulnerabilities (which are legion - complexity!), protection from scammers, enforcement of any contracts after you make payments in case you don't receive the goods, etc. It doesn't f
ree you from the state, it makes you
even more vulnerable and dependent on state power and stability of its enforcement!
Want evidence? No one is holding and trading cryptocraps, they do it through "exchanges"? Who polices the exchanges and prevents those who control them from just taking the things?
The traders are the ones skimming the profits. They're
the house in this casino.
Through progress the value became programmable and accessible. I am sure wealthy individuals and governments will find a way to centralise and monopolise some of those flows and will manage it well, like they did in the good old days of the Great Depression or the dot com crisis or in the 2008.
What tangible benefit does “management by political power” provide over “management by consensus mechanism”? If we agree on something, then it can be laid down in code, and when it is, it becomes law (or law-in-progress). Political power de facto serves the interests of major international capitalist groups. Consensus mechanism can be used to do the same, but with less friction and on the cheap. The principal difference between the two is that the latter is harder to manipulate in authoritarian way - you can’t fiddle with crypto interest rates on the whim just because your political party needs it NOW to look good on the internet.
Needless complexity is frailty, not progress. A trade arrangement that would depend on very complex networks functioning very well is a dumb idea. So dumb in fact that the cryptopcrap is used for speculation, not for trade. So cryptocraps are condemned to be a toy to last through speculative eras, and then collapse as they end. Far from being any "store of wealth", they'll be the first things to evaporate because they're sequentially useless. Land is worth something, real estate may fall but will still be worth something where people need shelter. Even base metals will be worth scrap price. Numbers produces and traded by algorithms are existent beyond the game they're part of. Come a social crisis they are useless because - again by definition -
in a social crisis the rules of the games, the games themselves played, change. Those things that depend on stable game rules simply vanish overnight.
Political power serves the interests of the groups of people who organize and mobilize to capture political power. It's not a fatality that it should serve the interests of a few wealthy individuals. In any case
by definition political power always controls the rules, there is no evading that. If you dislike the rues the only useful way you can change them is by capturing political power yourself to change them. That's the useful goal of any consensus to change. Any other "consensus" will be framed within what political power allows.
